Mimo artistry

There's a laptop in my top back bedroom that's browsing the internet. Up until a fortnight ago, that would have been impossible.

What's happened? Well, I've just turned on a new wireless router, one which promises all sorts of features, including much faster access. For me, however, there's one thing that makes it really useful: it reaches the parts of my house that previous wireless boxes never could.

Until now, it's just been too many walls and floors away from the broadband connection. There's one other thing that's surprising, at least in my house. It is a non-standard router. It's not got Wi-Fi branding.

For years, I've been a network standards bore - and that means I even bore other technical journalists. Basically, I believe in standards. If equipment meets a common standard - like Scart leads, USB memory, CDs or VHS tapes - you can buy equipment from anywhere, and know it will work.

Because your PC is based on standards, it is far easier to make decisions when you come to upgrade it. You can pretty much add any hard disk, and choose the cheapest or best memory. Networks based on standards have taken off in a big way, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi. Your laptop's Ethernet socket will connect first time to an Ethernet switch; its Wi-Fi antenna should talk to the service in Starbucks immediately; and the price of networking equipment are falling steadily.

My old Netgear router had a Wi-Fi certificate, but it didn't reach the top floor of my house. My new one does, but it has no certificate. It uses a technology called Mimo (multiple input, multiple output), which makes Wi-Fi signals travel longer distances and carry more data.

Radio signals bounce off walls and people, then interfere with each other, limiting their ability to carry signals. In a nutshell, Mimo turns this into an advantage. It uses several antennas and some clever processing, and uses those echoes to create multiple network paths. Mimo's ability to turn radio interference into an advantage gives it another great benefit: getting signals to dead spots like my top floor.

Mimo is too new for standards. A specification - known as 802.11n - may be complete in 2007. But equipment makers have spotted a feature people will pay for, and at least four companies have rushed out Mimo equipment. The routers sell for £80 or more, which is about twice the price of a more basic router, but the vendors - Netgear, Linksys, D-Link and Belkin - used three different Mimo systems between them.

Normally, I'd hesitate to use a box that goes outside standards, but for my upstairs room it's Mimo or nothing. So I either wait a year, or jump in now and buy a box that may not fully work with 802.11n equipment when it arrives. But the existing standards give me a safety net.

"We are not promising to upgrade existing products to 802.11n," says Vivek Pathela, product management director at Netgear. "What we are saying is the current RangeMax equipment is compliant to 802.11g and 802.11b, and will always interoperate with them." Since 802.11n will also be backwards compatible, I'm safe.

Any Centrino laptop and any Wi-Fi card will work with my access point, and that's good enough for me. My box doesn't have a certificate, because it hadn't passed the official tests when I got it. Products have to be put through their paces at the Wi-Fi Alliance's labs, which takes time. And in a fast-moving consumer market, vendors can't wait to get their products on shelves.

"We always want to have Wi-Fi Alliance compliance," said Pathela. "But sometimes we have to release the product before we have completed compliance testing." My product has now been certified, he says, and the boxes on shelves in the shops should soon reflect that.